Summerhill School
Leiston, SuffolkDear Reich,January 7, 195 1Your cheering letter arrived when I was in bed with a flu
epidemic that has caught us all. Your diagnosis is absolutely correct so
far as outer things are concerned. At present all sorts of educational
bodies meet to discuss things, but not one asks me to lecture at the
meetings; they get prominent teachers who say only the dead things
about life and education.
I shall not try this spring to get a U.S. visa, for there is no hope at
all. Sad, but there it is. I am realistic enough to know when I am beaten.
I have decided to write another book, mainly about Zoe, but not
giving her name; it is embarrassing for adolescents to find that as infants
they were "cases." Your own daughter said at my Hamilton Seminar:
"I'm tired of being called the Result of the Function of the Orgasm,"
said it with humour, but enough suggestion of truth to make me hesitate
to use Zoe's name. Apart from embarrassment, if we say too much about
Zoe and Peter and their like, the poor things will feel it difficult to live
up to what we say of them.
I wish I knew more about the contest between the world and you for
Peter's soul. Here our trouble is the world of un-self-regulated children
who infect Z. with their fears and hates and sadisms, but so far, not
making her sex conscious in a wrong way. She still doesn't want much
of me ; I am only the man who can tell her stories of animals. Her
identification of self with animals persists all the time; she wears out all
her stocking knees and shoe points crawling on the floor as a zebra or a
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